Thumbmaster Wu
An ill-conceived scheme of seduction over a drinking game with death knocking at her door
Names have been changed to protect people’s identities.
Thumbmaster Wu
By Kyung Sun Yu
Thumbmaster Wu
By Kyung Sun Yu
Jackie Wu and I met in our second year of college at the University of California, Santa Cruz and moved in together with three other girlfriends a year later. We were 19–20 years old. We lived in a five-bedroom, two story house with floor to ceiling living room windows — a house that made creaking noises at night, which we believed were perpetrated by ghosts, and was located a few blocks from a nudist beach.
One day, Jackie invited her friend, Tang, to come over to play drinking games with us. Jackie had ulterior motives. Tang had a friend, Ted, who she had been lusting after for some time. Ted was a beautiful looking guy, tall, slender, half Chinese and half white. Upon first sight, I had a crush on him too, which I never admitted, because Jackie had dibs on him and I wouldn’t do anything to cause conflict in our relationship. She thought nothing of the fact that she was just newly in remission from cancer and not a single strand of hair had grown back on her head due to chemotherapy. Her eyes were wild with conspiracy to seduce the object of her desire. How could I not be impressed by her reckless audacity?
Ted knew nothing of her cravings or her machinations. He had a quiet and gentle demeanor, unlike Tang who was boisterous and weird. Tang wore his wisdom tooth as a necklace and always had a mischievous glint in his eyes. Looking back, he was also quite handsome — physically fit with a slim face. But Tang was Chinese and I was only into white guys at the time so I gave no thought to hooking up with him. This night would be the Jackie show and I was her wing.
Tang arrived with Ted and another Asian dude, a case of beer and some bottles of hard liquor, probably cheap tequila — which seemed to be the basic, go-to drink for getting hammered among college students. It was all going to Jackie’s plan. I was so naïve back then, having had my first taste of vodka only a year earlier, I had no idea what was about to ensue. Jackie had informed me about her preternatural prowess with booze, but I hadn’t witnessed it myself. We had gone out for a drink or two once in a while, but I had no idea that we were about to witness a world-beater in drinking games, especially not one who weighed about 90 pounds and stood only a little more than five feet tall, recovering from the big C.
Several years earlier, Jackie was diagnosed with a form of bone cancer, osteosarcoma, in her knee. She had been on a backpacking trip through Europe after her high school graduation. I think that was the first time I had heard of anyone going on a solo backpacking trip to a foreign country. I was impressed with how bold and brave that sounded. I didn’t know there were lots of young people running around with backpacks exploring the world. I was also stunned because Jackie grew up in a very protective Burmese-Chinese immigrant family. To a girl like me, whose Korean immigrant parents were fearful of letting their kids out of their sight and barely let me go to a sleepover at my best friend’s house in Junior High, backpacking through Europe sounded like the tales of Marco Polo.
Jackie told stories of her travels with relish and vigor — how she had long permed hair then and men in Italy would approach her and shout out “Madonna!” at her beauty. She was walking around the cobblestone streets of Rome’s city center when she collapsed and lost consciousness. Someone took her to a hospital and they discovered something in her knee. She immediately returned to the states where she was diagnosed with cancer.
When I met Jackie, I didn’t understand what cancer was nor did she seem like an ailing person at all, aside from a slight limp she had due to her bad knee. In fact, she seemed just the opposite. I had never met someone my age who was so full of life and vitality — and I knew some vivacious and charismatic girls in school. But Jackie was on another level, in the way someone who’s had a near death experience comes back appreciating that life could go away in an instant. And it was intoxicating for me to be around her. She loved to tell funny stories and do outlandish things. She was a tiny thing, but the force of her personality defied her small frame.
The first time we hung out, we were in my apartment and her cancer was in remission. We connected so immediately that we talked late into the night. I felt like I had known her all my life. I remember vividly how our conversation somehow landed on an old interview of Oprah with Barbara Walters from 1988 that we had both seen on television. Oprah revealed that despite growing up poor, without a father, and having been raped by her uncle, she had a sense deep inside of her that she was meant to do something important in life. Jackie and I shared with each other that we felt exactly the same way. Growing up in this world, and especially with Asian immigrant parents who drilled humility and practical goals into our minds, it felt truly freeing to say to another person — I want great things for myself. These fireworks of the soul were released in that moment and cemented our bond. We became best friends for the next several years.
Before we moved in together, Jackie had missed several months of school because her cancer returned and she had to undergo chemotherapy, which caused her to lose all of her hair for the first time since her diagnosis. She eventually showed up at the house when her cancer went into remission, wearing a wig — a dark, wavy bob cut with bangs that formed a pyramid shape around her small face. She never talked about her months of recovery or how she suffered. She just dove right back into the swing of things with excitement. She wanted to drive around town so that she could pop off her wig at people on the street or nearby cars to shock them for kicks. I didn’t know then that she was putting on a brave face or teaching me about how to face adversities in life.
On the night of her lustful plot in Santa Cruz, Jackie was especially effervescent in anticipation of seeing Ted. She diligently combed her wig to look flawless and her eyes glowed. We all sat on the living room carpet around a very large round, dark wood table. We didn’t even have a sofa or chairs, just big chunky cushions. I can’t remember all of the various games we played, but we imbibed for a few to several hours. By the time we played Thumbmaster — when one person puts his or her thumb on the table and the last person to put their thumb on the table had to take shots — we were all slurring and sloshed, except Jackie. We even noticed that her reaction time was getting faster while the rest of us were literally teetering in our seats.
Was it possible for human reaction times to improve while inebriated? Tang’s ego couldn’t accept that she was drinking three young men under the table so he continued to challenge Jackie to more drinking games. But he and the rest of us were no match for Thumbmaster Wu. I had already tapped out earlier and laid face down on the carpet so I wouldn’t see the ceiling spinning. I did look up at one point to see Ted carrying Jackie away and waved at them.
After some time, I felt two hands massaging my back and looked to see both Tang and his friend each had one hand on me while flashing big, horny grins. This was one of the few times when I was grateful that my parents had ingrained in me a toxic and debilitating fear of sex as a teenager. Somehow, their bad parenting penetrated through my total drunken stupor. I quickly bolted up and ran downstairs into my room and locked the door. I got into my futon bed and fell asleep immediately. I don’t know how many hours passed but it was still dark out when I was woken up by a frantic knock on my door and Jackie’s voice whispering, “open the door!”
When I opened the door, Jackie stood there wearing her light blue and white striped cotton robe. She ran past me, diving onto my futon bed. I followed her feeling disoriented. She was very animated and laughing while saying she had just woken up stark naked next to Ted who was passed out, but was fully dressed. He even had his belt and socks on. She then said she couldn’t remember anything after he picked her up in the living room and carried her away. I asked her again if she was sure she remembers nothing. Surely, they must’ve had sex. Jackie emphatically reiterated, “NOTHING!” She was clearly shocked, herself. We didn’t know then that there was a word for such states called “blackout.”
Jackie pointed out that she couldn’t find her wig in her room. In all the commotion, I hadn’t noticed that she was sitting on my futon with her bald head fully exposed. She was more worried about whether Ted saw her with her wig off than if they had had sex. We burst out in laughter. She insisted I had to help her sneak into her room, without waking Ted, and retrieve her wig. Of course, I was game for such a reconnaissance mission.
We quietly slinked into Jackie’s bedroom and sure enough, Ted was splayed, face up on her bed snoozing away — t-shirt, pants, belt, socks all fully intact. He didn’t even look like someone who had tussled in bed with a girl. We poked around like two little mice scavenging for food in the dark while a cat slept nearby. At first, we looked near her futon bed because it seemed logical that it probably slipped off while they were groping and rolling around in coital action. But there was no sign of her wig. Then, we expanded our perimeter and that’s when I saw the black mop of hair several feet from the bed, on the other side of the room. I reached down, grabbed her wig and we scurried out.
I remember coming back into my room and voicing the forensic questions the scene presented: Why the hell was that wig so far away from the bed? Did Jackie fling it off while in the throes of ecstasy? Or worse, did Ted grab her hair, not knowing she was wearing a wig or had had cancer and accidentally pulled it off and threw it across the room in shock? Or was he so drunk it didn’t register? Or were they tearing up the room like ravenous monkeys in drunken heat? Jackie couldn’t provide an answer for any of these inquiries. But just imagining all of the scenarios brought us to that side-splitting, hysterical, so funny no sound could escape kind of laughter.
We fell asleep in my bed and in the morning, Jackie realized she had to ask Ted what happened. She wanted to know if they had sex, whether he used protection, whether she would need to be tested for pregnancy or chlamydia — a walk-of-shame checklist indeed. It all seemed so ridiculously humiliating that we laughed some more about how her plan of seduction went horribly awry.
A week later, Jackie finally summoned the strength to take Ted aside and broach the awkward conversation. When she downloaded the talk to me, she said he seemed shocked and a bit hurt, asking “you remember NOTHING?” Then, Ted told her they fooled around a bit but were too drunk and passed out. He confirmed that they didn’t have sex. Jackie was visibly relieved, though Ted didn’t mention anything about her wig and she didn’t have the courage to ask him if he saw her wig come off. But that conversation must’ve been so embarrassing for both of them, they never dated. Still, that night gave us a reason to laugh for many seasons to come.
Several years and adventures later, the cancer overtook Jackie’s body and she passed away at the age of 26. One year before she died, one leg was amputated at her thigh because the cancer cells were metastasizing rapidly from her knee.
The first time I saw her stump, I was shocked and alarmed, but didn’t show it because I didn’t want Jackie to feel worse — that was my 25 year-old’s thinking — not realizing that Jackie had begun attending group therapy for cancer survivors to help her process all of her feelings about what was happening to her. She probably wanted desperately to be able to talk about it with me, but I was too shut down emotionally at that time for my own reasons.
Plus, I just couldn’t help seeing Jackie as anything but invincible. In characteristic Jackie form, she made jokes about it, calling it her stumpy, asking me to touch her stump, sharing stories about waking up in the middle of the night feeling her phantom leg, how genuinely creepy and surreal it was, waving her prosthetic leg around like a toy — all while laughing. For someone with this much lifeforce, the amputation was just a speed bump, in my mind, definitely not some intractable mountain that could not be surmounted.
And that was true for a short while. She was even having sex regularly with her boyfriend, Ben — which was a lot more action than I was seeing at the time. And she began to dream about a future career in something she loved.
She always had a passion for science courses like biology and physiology and I naively encouraged her to apply to medical schools, convinced that her aptitude and passion for it would carry her through. Jackie relished watching medical surgery shows that did not censor a human body being cut open and organs being handled, while I literally felt my lunch threatening to evacuate through my mouth if I watched a second longer. She spoke as excitedly about seeing a kidney in a body as she did about finding a cardigan sweater on sale at The Gap. I helped to stoke the flames of her dreams of becoming a family pediatrician and she even dared to apply to Harvard Medical School.
One by one, Jackie’s application was rejected due to her history of cancer. She had poured her whole heart into taking the classes that would give her enough credits for medical school and now she was hollowed out of hope. She turned to Ben for reassurance and tried to have a sobering talk with him about whether he would stick around if “shit hit the fan” for her. He said she was being too “clingy” and broke up with her.
From my rear-view mirror, I can see that he was also just a kid at 25 years, freaking out and unable to handle his own emotions around such big and heavy circumstances. But back then, I fumed — thinking him a cowardly asshole who led her to believe he loved her and bailed when things got tough, not giving him any credit for sticking around after her amputation. This was another big blow, for Jackie, but I fully expected her to overcome just as she had always done.
One night, I was over at her brother’s house where she was living. We were watching television on the couch and afterwards, she started to talk about her treatments, and not getting into medical school and I don’t even remember what she said exactly but I looked at her face these words just came out of my mouth.
“This has been really hard for you.”
“Yes,” she said and then started to sob. To be honest, I don’t even know what I was feeling then. It was my very first inkling that Jackie had been putting up a brave front all of these years and I was just noticing that veil starting to fall away for the very first time. Jackie tears must have been an indication of the tremendous relief she felt, of shedding the mask of strength and jovial attitude she’d been wearing, even in front of her most trusted bestie.
I finally was seeing another side of Jackie — her vulnerability, suffering and fears and I truly appreciated her courage. I felt ashamed of my ignorance and naivete and was filled with admiration for her strength. That was a minor breakthrough for me, but I needed a lot more time, years in fact, to become emotionally healed from my own brokenness and available enough to really connect with Jackie before she left this earth. Unfortunately, we were running out of time. And then a miracle happened.
Before the miracle, Jackie’s mom’s found a Burmese psychic in San Francisco — a blind woman who spoke such an obscure dialect of Burmese that even her mother needed to find a translator for herself. Jackie asked me to come with her for support and of course I acceded. Aside from wanting to be there for Jackie, I had never seen a psychic before. And even more enticing, I couldn’t pass up the chance to see a blind psychic who spoke a lost language. You might as well have told me she was an oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece! Besides, I was optimistic. I was sure the psychic woman would tell us that there was nothing to worry about, Jackie would persevere because that’s what Jackie does.
I met Jackie and her mother at her brother’s house. Her mom had prepared lunch in her usual fashion — a spread of Burmese delights that was restaurant worthy, including my favorite, a simple but sublime steamed whole fish with soy, vinegar dressing heaped with thinly julienned ginger and scallions, devoured with jasmine white rice.
On the car ride to the psychic’s apartment, Jackie and I made light conversation about various things, just like any other day. There was so much whirling in my mind at the time, I don’t remember much other than the pungent smell of incense in the apartment and the psychic, an elderly woman, possibly in her 70s, very thin and frail looking. Once we all took our seats on the floor, Jackie’s mom and the translator exchanged a few words in Burmese that Jackie did not comprehend. Jackie didn’t even ask her mother for a translation, which should’ve been an indication to me that she was very nervous.
Then, the psychic closed her eyes and started to chant, almost in a song, and swayed her body to the rhythm for what seemed like several minutes, but could’ve only been 30 seconds. It felt like she was calling to the spirits asking them to see into Jackie’s future. The translator started to whisper to Jackie’s mom, while the psychic was still chanting.
I remember feeling lulled by the repetitive drone and the hairline column of smoke rising from the incense stick. My eyes were so fixed on the psychic, as if I was waiting for her to do some kind of magic act, like doves would fly out of her chest that I didn’t notice Jackie’s mom. But Jackie did.
I leaned over to Jackie and whispered, “do you know what the translator is saying?”
“No,” she said very flatly. “But my mom is crying.”
I whipped my head around and saw that tears were flowing out of Mrs. Wu’s eyes, as she sat frozen, not moving her head, not reaching out for Jackie’s hand, not twitching a single muscle. At the end of the session, Jackie’s mom didn’t say a word to her. We rode home in silence. At the house, Jackie seemed on edge and confided that her mother’s tears could only mean one thing — that the psychic had foreseen her death.
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I was surprised, but didn’t feel concerned at all. To me psychics were characters in lore — devices in Greek mythology or biblical tales. I had never met someone who could predict the future and I wasn’t about to start now and I told Jackie as much. But what was more important was that Jackie couldn’t see any kind of future for herself anymore. Her boyfriend was gone and her dream of becoming a doctor was summarily rejected by America’s institutions of higher learning. She did not have the will or desire to try again or even pursue foreign medical schools.
Soon her cancer returned and spread so rapidly through her lungs that doctors informed her family that there was no way to save her this time. Her older brother had severe panic attacks where he had to pull over on the freeway during his commute to work. Jackie’s family all came to accept this diagnosis in their own way.
I was convinced Jackie would pull through. Afterall, we forged our bond under the stars, confessing only to each other that like Oprah, we knew we were meant to do something great in this life. Neither of us had yet fulfilled that promise so she couldn’t possibly be done. She was only 25 years old. There was no way things could end like this.
I couldn’t even admit to myself that I was starting to come up with grievances about my relationship with Jackie. I started to feel like we were disconnected, because all she could talk about was her cancer and I felt guilty about sharing the adventures I was experiencing working on documentaries that took me on travels to various parts of the United States. But I didn’t feel like I could express any form of happiness, especially given her condition. And I wasn’t about to abandon her like Ben. So, this one-way silence was starting to develop into a kind of resentment.
Grief operates in strange ways and I don’t know if this was my way of detaching so that I wouldn’t be so consumed with sorrow.
The final time Jackie and I communicated verbally, she was at home and we sat on her sofa. This time she looked beleaguered, making no pretense that everything was all right. She looked me in the eyes searchingly.
“Oh, Kyung,” she said wearily. “I know you and I have done everything together but…”
I must have had the look of terror in my eyes because she didn’t finish her thought. Her mom was in the kitchen washing dishes and she told me about how she spent the days with her mother, not doing anything very special, her mom in the kitchen either preparing food for her or washing the dishes but it all felt “so very precious now.” And she wept.
That was the closest we got to talking about her dying. She seemed to be able to read that I was still in denial. I sat as she cried, but I couldn’t utter a word of comfort. I just froze. I couldn’t speak. I was numb so I didn’t feel anything but my response must have crushed Jackie. Afterwards, she would not see me for several weeks, though I relentlessly called her and asked her family to let me come and visit. She had obviously instructed them that she didn’t want me to come to see her.
I was utterly confused by her actions. It almost felt like a betrayal. I was her best friend who she confided in without reservation or censorship. I was the friend she shared with about what it was like making whoopie with an amputated leg — laughing with glee like she had just won the lottery. I was the friend she brought with her to her family’s Sunday brunches, where I learned that there were secret menus in San Francisco’s Chinese restaurants, where the good stuff laid in waiting only for those who knew. I was her BFF who snuck into her bedroom in college to retrieve her wig after her night of debauchery.
Why did she suddenly shut me out without an explanation?
I didn’t realize that she had a world of emotions she was processing while coming to terms with her impending death. My denial, my cheerleading and my belief that she would overcome this just as she had all of her previous times, was not helping anymore. In fact, it was horribly hurtful to her.
I even spoke with my supervisor at a work retreat about my confusion as to why Jackie wouldn’t see me. The supervisor pulled me aside and put her arm around me, saying very gently, “Honey, it doesn’t look like she’s gonna make it.”
That remark, intended to be an act of compassion, landed like a punch in the face. I stared at her completely stupefied for a few seconds.
“What?” I blurted. “No!” and stormed off.
Weeks later, out of nowhere, Jackie’s brother called me and said that she had deteriorated rapidly and was close to dying. She wished to die at home so they had her hooked up to morphine drip in her bedroom. He told me to come and see her.
I didn’t mentally prepare for seeing Jackie in that state. Her sister, who was in nursing school, told me just before I entered her bedroom that she was unconscious but she could hear and understand everything I said, meaning she was not in a coma state.
Jackie was laying on just a mattress because her bed frame had been removed, in case she rolled off. Even though she was covered in a blanket, I could tell she was just a whisp of a body, barely here, signaling that she was on her way out of material form. She breathed with oxygen tubes up her nostrils and a morphine drip hooked to her arm. She had always been very fair skin but she was like a white marble statue with all of her hair gone.
I approached her slowly, in some state of disbelief that this was actually happening. This was my invincible Jackie and I couldn’t trust what I was beholding — a frail and helpless being. I sat by her bed, struggling to find the words, the right words, the perfect words to say that would be profound enough to capture this moment, this awareness and acceptance of her mortality that was creeping up on me.
The only other time I really felt death prior to this was when I was with Jackie, and my mother called to tell me that my grandmother had died. Through the phone, I heard my mom cry like I had never heard her cry before — like a little girl calling out for her mommy. Then I started to cry and Jackie saw me cry for the first time in our friendship. She was so tender and sympathetic about it, getting permission from her brother to let me sleep over so I wouldn’t have to drive across the Bay Bridge back to my apartment in Oakland in that state of sorrow.
In her bedroom now, I wanted to be the one to console and comfort her. But I only drew a blank.
“Say something, idiot!” I scolded myself. “Say anything!”
I was utterly disgusted with myself. It was the first time I became aware that I couldn’t access my emotions I couldn’t will myself to feel my own feelings. I was at a loss for what to do or say and felt overwhelmed with helplessness. All I could think to do was reach out for Jackie’s hand and hold it in mine.
“Jackie, can you hear me?” I said softly.
I didn’t understand it then, but what I was doing was giving up my desire to say the perfect thing. It was surrender. And the next thing that happened was something I couldn’t believe.
A current of energy entered my body, creating a tingling sensation. I felt Jackie’s presence or essence inside of me, inside of my heart specifically, HELPING me feel my grief and sorrow because I couldn’t do it on my own. To my total shock, I began weeping furious tears as all of the emotions flowed out like a river unleashed. I didn’t need words, because Jackie was inside me — knowing and understanding everything there was to know about how I felt about her — how I admired and loved her and how devastated I was about her demise.
“How is she doing this?” I wondered.
To this day, I don’t know if I was channeling or what happened. It didn’t feel like a possession where I blacked out and she took over. It felt like we were both in there — that our souls were communicating in the deepest and most intimate way, in orders of magnitude more intimate than any experience of lovemaking I ever had. It felt transcendental even though I didn’t believe in God, Higher Power or Divine Source back then. However, I knew I touched something sacred and numinous and most importantly, absolutely real, as real as the mattress Jackie was laying on.
I’ve never experienced anything like that since. It was decades later I learned about the “dissolution of boundaries” in spiritual teachings that Ram Dass described. It was a moment of grace which left me without any regrets that I had not said the things I wanted to say before her passing. I sobbed until I felt weightless, purified and absolved. I felt ready for whatever Jackie and her family needed from me. I could not have imagined the request they would make.
Her brother asked me to join them for lunch in the kitchen where her mother, once again, had made a huge spread of Burmese food. It was surreal because we had all been bawling our eyes out but the mood wasn’t as somber and tragic as I had imagined people would be in the face of impending death. We feasted with hearty appetites.
After lunch, they asked me to join them in her room and pointed out the piles of Jackie’s clothes that had been taken out of her closet and drawers, with the hangers removed. Having been unable to pass up a sale at The Gap, Jackie had amassed a closet full of blouses, cardigans, pants, jeans, skirts, tanks, sweaters, scarves, worn and unworn lingerie — that would have sustained an eBay store for years.
“Do you want me to take her clothes to Goodwill?” I asked.
“No,” her brother replied. “According to my mother, it’s Burmese tradition that at the exact moment a person’s spirit leaves her body, the family has to throw ALL of her clothes on top of her so that she can travel to the afterlife with her clothes.”
I stared at the mound of garments that stood about four feet high next to Jackie’s bed. But before I had a chance to consider how strange and deranged such a custom was or visualize the logistics of what that would look like, I found myself nodding yes, that I would absolutely help with that. Throwing several pounds of clothing on top of an immobile dying person hooked up to a respirator and doped up on morphine — sure! What could possibly go wrong? If everyone in Burma does it, who was I to be the naysayer?
None of us stopped to think through that Burmese people of yester-years probably were not afflicted with shopaholism and therefore no single individual owned several pounds of apparel. In our defense, though, who could think clearly at this point? Everyone was delirious from stress, sleep deprivation and grief.
We all took shifts for the next several days, staying in Jackie’s room, waiting for her heart monitor to flatline so we could call the others into the room and hurl her clothes onto her body. As if being on death watch wasn’t a surreal enough, having to keep a close eye on the exact moment her soul would depart her flesh was a lot of pressure. What if I dozed off and missed it? Jackie’s mother would never forgive me.
I was worried for no reason, because the day it happened, or sort of, was a day when her whole family was present so I was off the hook. Most of us were in the living room when Jackie’s nursing school sister yelled out from the bedroom to come quick, she was flatlining. We all rushed inside her room, each of us grabbed piles of her clothes with both arms, and then flung hefty pounds of apparel on her, covering her from head to toe.
Jackie’s brother started to laugh maniacally, saying “If cancer doesn’t kill her, she’ll die of suffocation from all of her clothes!” That made all of us break out into laughter — all of us except her mother, who was sure she was doing her duty by sending her daughter into the afterlife properly.
Then her nurse sister shouted, “it’s not it! It’s not it!” as the heart monitor made waves again, indicating a heartbeat. Oh shit!
We hurriedly grabbed piles of clothes on top of Jackie and threw them off of her body, laughing at this absurd and macabre scene, and how Jackie would’ve found all of this so hilarious. It was exactly her sense of humor. Perhaps she was even laughing in that instant — or perhaps she was even orchestrating the whole thing for her amusement.
We tried this garment-pile send off one or two more times, but Jackie held on longer than anyone had expected so everyone was drained. Caregivers tend to feel very guilty about saying such things while tending to a loved one dying, but why shouldn’t something so shatteringly profound as the transition from human form to spirit (if one believes in such things) or even at the very least, a human life ending shake up the entire force field around them? Why wouldn’t we all be emptied of the tsunami of emotions that pummel us during such an event. And we did become shells.
What a profound and mystical encounter I had with Jackie and God and how that all turned into a comedic farce, like a great psilocybin trip, better than any movie. It was the opposite of that great Chuck Palahniuk quote “a good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.” Jackie’s story breaks your heart and then makes you laugh — which is the order Jackie and I prefer.
Jackie passed away in the hospital while I was in Los Angeles visiting my family. At her funeral, her family asked me to speak and I fumbled through it, but was able to express how she left me with the indelible memory of how Jackie devoured life with passion and glee.
The night of Thumbmaster Wu exemplified exactly how she lived. Perhaps playing drinking games until you blackout in the aftermath of chemo isn’t the prescribed way to go about recovery and remission. Who knows?
What Jackie showed me that night and many other days and nights of our friendship was that she didn’t let the disease define her — that she would not limit herself from fully experiencing the joys and fumbles of life just because death was her neighbor.
